Prominent Montreal author Heather O’Neill said Concordia must act now to put a stop to a culture of predatory behaviour in its creative writing department.

“It has to change,” said O’Neill, who attended the program. “It has just been too disgusting for too long.”

O’Neill told the Montreal Gazette in an interview Wednesday that she was one of the victims of what she called a “gross abuse of authority” perpetrated by men who not only control the grades their students get, but have the power to launch their careers in the literary world.

“I was harassed by a particular professor there, who originally initiated contact by calling me at home and saying he wanted to publish some of my poems in the university literary magazine. Of course, I was delighted,” O’Neill said. She said when she met the professor for drinks, she realized he was more interested in establishing a sexual relationship.

“In his mind, it was a date, and he kept making sexual advances.”

O’Neill, an award-winning author for Lullabies for Little Criminals among other books, said the sexual harassment continued, with the professor setting up other meetings, which she called totally inappropriate, to discuss other pieces she had written.

“Obviously, (today), I would have nixed this entire thing, but then I was young and naive,” she said. “For the next few years, it was just continual sexual harassment from him. He groped me in ways that to this day make me cringe.”

She said the professor offered to edit a book of poetry that had been accepted for publication by a company for which he was an editor. However, he told O’Neill she would have to spend an entire weekend with him alone at his country house.

“I was like, ‘There is absolutely no way.’ I would never be isolated with him,” she said. “In the end, he didn’t edit the book at all.”

She described the experience as hellish, as she had to continually circumvent his advances, and the behaviour seemed to be well-known and even accepted within the Concordia community.

“The problem is that it was sort of pervasive in the department at Concordia. He was well known for dating students and harassing students.”

She didn’t think of filing a complaint with the school about the professor’s behaviour, fearing it would be perceived she received special treatment for getting her poetry published.

“People asked me: would you make these reports to Concordia? These people are the institution themselves.”

Now more than 20 years after she attended the institution, O’Neill is disheartened to see little appears to have changed over that time, especially after speaking to a longtime professor who mentioned off the cuff a few years ago that male professors sleep with female students 100 per cent of the time.

While she has been speaking out about the culture of harassment at the university in recent years, she said she was spurred on even more by a recent blog post by author and former Concordia student Michael Spry, who spoke of cases when he attended the school roughly a decade after O’Neill.

“When I read that blog, it sickened me to my stomach, because this is the same atmosphere that was at Concordia when I was there. Where did the new roster of sexual harassers learn this? From the previous one. They came into an institution where this was not only acceptable, but admired.”

O’Neill said Concordia must put in place a strict policy barring romantic relationships between professors and students, and crack down on professors at the school who have engaged in predatory behaviour.

“Even if a relationship is consensual, I’m sorry, if you have a very young woman and a 50-year-old professor where dating him will give access to (career advancement opportunities), that’s not consensual. That’s abuse, and I can’t deal with the fact that this is still going on.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Concordia University president Alan Shepard said he only learned Monday about what some on social media are calling an “open secret” — allegations of sexual misconduct by certain professors in the university’s respected creative writing program. He vowed to investigate the allegations.

While the university invited students to report sexual abuse, O’Neill said whatever policy is in place is clearly not working. She said the names of some of the abusers appear to be circling on social media circles, so the university should be aware of who the perpetrators are.

“They need to protect their students. They have not done a good job of (that),” she said. “I just don’t want this to happen to other young girls. The culture needs to change.”

O’Neill also said the #MeToo campaign has helped bring this problem to light, but it is unrealistic to expect that women experiencing abuse will come forward and risk their careers to call out their abusers through legal action.

“Legal recourse leads to nothing. As women, we know it’s a waste of time, we end up being torn apart in court, and it doesn’t lead to any form of justice,” she said.

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